3D facial expression modeling based on facial landmarks in single image

Facial expression modeling is important for many applications such as human emotional analysis and facial animation. Generally, facial expression modeling from single 2D facial image is difficult. Different head poses and scales of facial data in images affect the accuracy of the modeling results. We propose a new 3D facial expression modeling method which is based on facial landmarks from single image. Using the facial landmarks, expression modeling can be processed in Kendall shape space. The Kendall shape space is mathematic space, the facial expression modeling process in Kendall shape space can be regarded as a geodesic path search between different faces. The modeling result is more accurate. The 3D facial expression modeling result is convenient to obtain from 2D facial image with different head poses. In experiments, we show the 3D facial expression modeling performance by our method, which include expression editing and evaluation in public facial database: JAFFE, LFW, Helen and RAF-DB. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.